Posts Tagged ‘TARP’

Still money left in that piggy bank: Justice Department shakes $1.7 billion out of J.P. Morgan because its custody wing kept handling a primary Bernie Madoff account while a distant equity desk grew suspicious of him, in what “looks a bit like a tax on bigness and integration” [Matt Levine, Bloomberg; NPR].

NYT assails a couple of academics as mouthpieces for Wall Street, Felix Salmon has a bit to say about that [Reuters, EconBrowser, Bainbridge, Pirrong] Daniel Fisher on a possible tie-in with Times reporter David Kocieniewski’s earlier piece flaying Goldman Sachs over aluminum warehousing [Forbes]

…settlements resulting from the scores of shareholder suits against TARP entities will stretch into the stratosphere.

Sure, through TARP, taxpayer money may be used to pay off mortgages and fund bonus pools. But, in what will amount to a far more expensive proposition, TARP money will also be used to line the pockets of allegedly aggrieved shareholders and the lawyers who, wrapped smugly in the flag of corporate governance, are in the process of making a billion-dollar cottage industry out of filing strike suits.

As Thom Lambert (via Larry Ribstein) makes clear, the Massachusetts Democrat either doesn’t understand the nature of the bank program, or does understand it and has chosen to demagogue the issue anyway (cross-posted from Point of Law).